About /

/ James Tadd Adcox is the author of Does Not Love, a domestic novel about domestic terrorism, as well as a novella, Repetition, and a collection of stories, The Map of the System of Human Knowledge. His email address is jamestaddadcox AT gmail DOT com.

He is currently at work on a new novel. Granta published an excerpt here.

/ Twitter @inauthenticity

Writing /

/ Does Not Love / Press, Reviews

/ Repetition / Press, Reviews

/ The Map of the System of Human Knowledge / Reviews

/ Stories, Poems

Editorial /

/ Always Crashing Magazine (editor of)

[Back]

/ PRINT

        / "An Essay on Moustaches," Passages North, forthcoming

        / "Denmark: Variations 1, 2, 5," CutBank, Iss. 80

        / "Scientific Method (excess, ground, worm, spiders)," Skydeer Helpking, Iss. 1

        / "A History of the Infinity Room," Birkensnake, Iss. 6, Neverending Tales edition

        / "Scientific Method (word, cloud, thing)," The Pinch, Vol. 33 No. 2

        / "Blind," Whiskey Island, Iss. 62

        / "The Separation," "Caterers," NANO Fiction, Vol. 5 No. 2

        / "Robert and Viola Are Attempting to See Other People," Redivider, Vol. 9 Iss. 2

        / "Some Examples of Things That Are Not Metaphors," Curbside Splendor Magazine, Iss. 2 / -->Video by Garett Holden

        / "The Bed Frame," Way We Sleep Anthology

        / "Mice," RHINO, 2012

        / "A Sympathetic Response to Certain Energies," "The Heart of Fu-Manchu," Keyhole Magazine, Iss. 10

        / "We sit in the bed and count the bones...," Stamp Stories Anthology, Mud-Luscious Press

        / "The Deathful Hand of Fu-Manchu," Mildred Pierce, Iss. 4

        / "Divination," Mid-American Review, Vol. 31 No. 2

        / "Five Autobiographies," Another Chicago Magazine, Iss. 50

        / "No One in the Office Knows What the Work Is: Five Short-Shorts," Barrelhouse Magazine, Iss. 8

        / "Previously Unknown Forms of Fathers," Bateau, Vol. 3 Iss. 1

        / "Side Interests of Don Juan," Makeout Creek Review, Iss. 1

        / "Elena," The Delinquent, Iss. 8

        / "The Judgment," "Home Intruders," The Literary Review, Vol. 53 No. 2

        / "Hang On for the Forthcoming Information Revolution," Quick Fiction, Iss. 12

/ ELECTRONIC

        / "The Answer," "The President," Wigleaf, forthcoming

        / "Exhibits for the Defense," The Collagist, Oct. 2018

        / "She Hated the Child," The Rumpus, May 2018

        / "Four Very Short Stories," Squalorly, Iss. 7

        / "Do We Stand on the Brink of a New Revolutionary Moment?," MonkeyBicycle Online, Nov. 2013

        / "What Is New," SPORK Online, Oct. 2013

        / "Scientific Method (eggs, God, shirt, organ, island)," PANK, June 2013

        / "Scientific Method (expanding, picture)," Sixth Finch, Spring 2013

        / "Scientific Method (earthquake, map, caused)," ILK, Iss. 8

        / "Robert and Viola Talk about Their Options," Red Lightbulbs, Iss. 10

        / "Millard Fillmore," Their Peculiar Ambitions: 44 Stories about Our 44 Presidents, Melville House, Oct. 2012

        / "Tuscaloosa," Untoward Magazine

        / "Viola Is Sitting on the Examination Table," The Collagist, Iss. 31

        / "The First Thing That Viola Stole from Robert Was His Monogrammed Pen," >kill author, Iss. 17

        / "The Monopoly of Violence," "The Final Logic," ILK, Iss. 4

        / "Abnormal Habits Prohibitive," Red Lightbulbs, Iss. 5 [video w/Meghan Lamb]

        / "Break Their Teeth, O God, in Their Mouth, Break Out the Teeth of the Young Lions," trnsfr, Iss. 5

        / "The Skin Game," LIES/ISLE, Iss. 6

        / "(...)," Used Furniture Review

        / "Four Letters from Robert Kloss" (w/Robert Kloss), elimae, June/July 2011

        / "Three Letters from Robert Kloss" (w/Robert Kloss), Metazen, July 2011

        / "Some Mornings They Woke in an Entirely Other Flesh" (w/Robert Kloss), Abjective, May 2011

        / "two boxes of pages I assumed were his new novel and the various film scripts he stooped to work on" (w/Robert Kloss), Anti- Poetry, Iss. 8

        / "Leonards," Ghost Ocean Magazine, Iss. 4

        / "I Am a Natural Wonder," I Am a Natural Wonder: A Collaboration, Feb. 2011

        / "The Bed Frame," "The Off Season," "The Weight of the Internet," "A Dial Tone," TriQuarterly, Iss. 139

        / "The Rise of Dr. Fu-Manchu," Necessary Fiction, Dec. 2010

        / "The Final Room" (w/Robert Kloss), Necessary Fiction, Dec. 2010

        / "Elena" (reprint), The Reprint, Iss. 1

        / "Eternal Recurrence," Metazen Christmas Charity eBook

        / "Diseases, Disorders, Breaks ('The Reverend Dr. BH Shadduck is on the television...')," >kill author, Iss. 10

        / "A Shell Is Coming through All the Walls and Destroying Everything," Metazen, Nov. 2010

        / "Karameneh," Metazen, Oct. 2010

        / "The Life of BARBARA SPENCER, Coiner, etc," Lamination Colony, 2010

        / "The Original Child," "Geese," Knee-Jerk Magazine, Iss. 15

        / "DISEASES DISORDERS BREAKS," PANK, June 2010

        / "Two Years after the Accident," Six Sentences, May 2010

        / "The Heart of Fu-Manchu Regrets," Nanoism, Aug. 2010

        / "Gentlemen," Abjective, June 2010

        / "The Gift Shop," >kill author, Iss. 7

        / "A Forgotten Picture," Requited, Summer 2010

        / "The Artificial Mountain," "Annual Report," "The Hall of Classified Information," n+1, Dec. 2009

        / "I Keep Finding Things I Thought I'd Lost Long Ago," PANK, Dec. 2009

        / "Four Disconnected Truths about My Father," Smokelong Quarterly, Iss. 27

Does Not Love / Press, Reviews

[Back]

/ Named a "Best Fiction Book of 2014" by Entropy Magazine

/ "Adcox brilliantly melds the personal and political in exacting prose." David Gutowski, Largehearted Boy

/ "Funny, surreal, satiric, pensive, and strangely haunting. . . . A novel where the world might sort of end and a troubled couple may reconcile and they both feel equally important." Paul Albano, Electric Literature

/ "Every marriage is built of moments where two people stayed, but could have left. And all the moments in between. And all the emptiness between them. Adcox's novel Does Not Love is a beautiful compendium of these moments." Meghan Lamb, HTMLGIANT

/ "An exciting, heartfelt contemporary novel that incorporates elements from a lot of interesting American literature into something new and unusual. . . . The story, imagery, and characters are so bright and well-rendered, I almost started picturing the scenes in black and white illustration with jagged thought bubbles above the main characters’ heads.  Robert and Viola, the couple whose marriage is at the heart of DOES NOT LOVE, felt like old-fashioned doomed lovers, struggling in a classic way, making their thoughts and talks innately dramatic." Monika Woods, Books I Just Read

/ "Begins as an offbeat domestic drama with hints of something sinister, and as it gets rolling, it gets stranger and stranger, until it hits a bizarre and jarring and yet utterly appropriate climax." Chris Schahfer, Chicago Center for Literature and Photography

/ "surreal. poignant. brooding. magnetic. repressive. lingering. evocative. it’ll leave a weird taste in your mouth and you’ll continue to crave it. maybe it’ll express what happiness has the potential to be. maybe you’ll feel that for a week." Beyza Ozer, Probaby Crying Review

/ "As this tale of secret projects and secret laws unfolds, we come to see that for the characters, 'love, too' is 'a kind of violence, drawing everything into the emptiness at its center.'" Heather Scott Partington, Buffalo Almanack

/ "The secret laws and secret courts that Adcox has dreamt up would feel right at home in Kafka’s The Trial, as would the emptiness and pointless complexity of those entities. The only difference here is that Adcox allows his agents of pointless complexity to reflect upon what they have wrought in ways that Kafka does not. . . . A novel of its time, and one that has arrived none too soon." Marc Schuster, Monkeybicycle

/ . . . In addition, people say some very nice things about the book on Goodreads. For example, Anderson says "This is the best book I've read all year." And M. says "the narrative of a heterosexual drama is actually compulsively fascinating."

/ Interview at the Los Angeles Review of Books.

/ Interview with Drew Smith at Vol. 1 Brooklyn. Topics include Daniel Clowes, manic first drafts, and plot as a form of anxiety.

/ Interview with Connor Goodwin at Chicago Literati. Topics include phonetics vs. phonology, writing as sculpture, and War and Peace slash fiction.

/ Interview with Sarah Layden in Indianapolis Monthly. Topics include the secrets of Indianapolis, small press literature, and balancing humor and pathos.

/ Excerpts: At Atticus Review, at The Nervous Breakdown, at Hawai'i Pacific Review

[Back]

/ "We can trace a recurring fascination with disappearance, reappearance, dissolution and distortion in these stories - lost possessions are coughed up by kitchen sinks, rooms shrink and expand arbitrarily, unknown animals uncurl in vacuum-cleaner dust." Chris Emslie, The Collagist

/ "Adcox's stories float in some fantastical ether between the real and the imagined, in the provenance of unmoving arms, ungrabbing hands, and freaks of all sorts." Rachel Hyman, The Rumpus

/ "The pieces themselves are beautiful, subtle, and exciting. Many move like prose poetry. Some provide the flavor of micro-memoir. What we have here is Etgar Keret high-fiving Donald Barthelme - these pieces explore the human heart and the human head at once, through compelling relationships and stimulating thought experiments, through serious play." Joseph Scapellato, Gulf Coast

/ "...the best flash collections function as exploded novels or dissertations, their shards scraping and embedding themselves in you, until you take one to a lonely lunch and shed a tear onto your neon-relished Polish, and you're not sure you can really point to all the connective tendrils constricting so tightly around your tiny heart, but you're sure that something bigger is happening." Josh Kleinberg, Monkeybicycle

/ "James Tadd Adcox makes folk tales for the modern era." Beach Sloth

/ "A series of moments in which the characters find things or learn things, yes, but what's most vital to them is how to process this discovery: what do we do with this..." David Blomenberg, Sycamore Review

/ "Everything in this book is deliberate, and Adcox guides you along the system of human knowledge with precision and care. It is, at times, funny and tragic, raw and whimsical." Joey Pizzolato, Curbside Splendor

/ "Everything is transformed into something new." Joellyn Powers, Used Furniture Review

/ "Here salvation or transcendence shows up in horrifying banality and shows itself as explicitly normal." Leif Haven, HTMLGIANT

[Back]

/ "...calls attention to its own unlikeliness of existing, and the absurdity that it actually does, reveling in it with total sincerity one second then riffing on its own ridiculousness the next." Layne Ransom, Vouched Books

/ "Is this the alt lit version of bible studies?" Beach Sloth Part I / Part II

Interviews, etc.

[Back]

/ "A Book Is This Hopeless Task." Interview with Jamie Iredell at Atticus Review

/ "Fun with Taxonomy: An Interview with James Tadd Adcox." Interview with Gina Myers at Frontier Psychiatrist

/ "What Is Simultaneously There and Not-There." Interview with Melissa Goodrich at The Collagist

/ Excerpt from "Scientific Method." Reading at Literary Firsts, Cambridge:

/ Excerpt from "Some Examples of Things That Are Not Metaphors." Video by Garett Holden:

/ "Let's get right to the cut: tell me about Malort, and why on God's earth do you make me drink it every time I'm in Chicago, and why on God's earth do I drink it, even though I know it's the official drink of Hell?" Interview with Christopher Newgent at Vouched Books

xxx